White Hot

by Ilona Andrews

  No answer. It was three in the morning.

  I’m sorry to wake you, but this is really important. Please wake up. If I blew up his phone, the beeps would wake him up.

  Sorry.

  Wake up.

  Sorry again.

  Wake up.

  A reply popped onto the screen. I’m up. On it. Are you okay?

  Yes. Thank you so much.

  I exhaled. He would find a way to do it.

  I put my phone away and looked at myself in the mirror. There were bags under my eyes and they weren’t Prada. I was so tired all of a sudden, I could barely stand. I had to get out of this bathroom, because the floor was beginning to look nice and inviting.

  I washed my hands, came out, and sat on the couch. They were still talking about something, but I could no longer follow. My eyes were closing. I tried so hard to keep them open, but someone had attached weights to my eyelids. Augustine said something I couldn’t quite hear. Rogan answered and then the world turned soft, warm, and dark, and I sank into the welcoming blackness.

  Chapter 11

  The tantalizing scent of freshly brewed coffee drifted over to me. I opened my eyes.

  The ceiling didn’t look familiar. I wasn’t in my house. That meant I was . . .

  I sat straight up. I was in Rogan’s command room, on one of his huge black leather couches. Someone had put a pillow under my head and a blanket over the rest of me. At the far end of the room, Rogan poured coffee into a large black mug. He wore a white T-shirt and black pants. The T-shirt molded to his biceps. He looked like he’d spent the last hour working out and had just taken a shower.

  He saw me and grinned. It was an evil kind of grin and all of the alarms blared in my head.

  “What time is it?”

  “Ten past nine.”

  Terror shot through me. “Morning?” Please don’t say morning.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh no. Did you tell my family where I was?”

  “No.”

  I exhaled.

  “But I imagine Cornelius did when he went back to your warehouse.”

  Ugh. I lay back on the couch and pulled the blanket over my head. I would never live it down. Grandma Frida and my sisters would be merciless. “So you spent the night with Mad Rogan? How was it? When is the wedding?”

  The blanket moved down, revealing Mad Rogan standing over me, way too close for comfort. He looked even larger from this angle, which was a neat trick considering he was already huge. He had shaved, his jaw completely clean. I liked stubble better. It made him . . . more human. Now he looked every inch a Prime, except for a narrow red gash on his cheek.

  I see a Prime . . . Prime or not, Rogan and I still weren’t equal. We probably would never be.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked.

  “We’re waiting on the dispensation from Cornelius’ sister. There was no point in waiting here, so everyone went home.” He smiled a wicked smile, as if I were a delicious lamb who’d somehow wandered into his wolf den. “Except you.”

  I sighed. “You might not want to count on that dispensation.”

  “I gathered they’re not close.”

  “His sister hadn’t seen Matilda since she was a year old.”

  “Are you afraid of what your family will think?” he asked, drinking his coffee.

  “I’m not afraid. I’m mentally preparing myself for a vigorous defense. You should’ve woken me up.”

  “You overextended yourself,” he said. “Your body needed rest.”

  “I just closed my eyes for a moment.”

  “You passed out,” he said, a grin tugging at his mouth. A man had no business being so handsome first thing in the morning.

  “I did no such thing.”

  “Did you know you snore?” he asked.

  “I don’t.”

  “You do. It’s adorable.” He winked at me.

  I threw a pillow at him. It stopped a couple of inches from his face and streaked back to its spot on the couch. He crouched by me. The distance between us suddenly shrunk. His coffee mug moved to the side table.

  “You know what I think?” he asked. His gaze snagged on my hair. He reached over and touched one blond strand. “I think your family will expect that you stayed over here and you and I had unforgettably dirty sex.”

  My mind went straight to the gutter.

  “Especially after they see your hair.”

  I pulled my hair out of his fingers. “What’s wrong with my hair?”

  “It’s the special style called the morning after.”

  I touched my head. Last night’s hair spray, rain, and my pillow had clearly conspired to create a once-in-a-lifetime mess on my head. My hair felt like it was standing straight up.

  Rogan was looking at me and in the depths of his blue eyes, I saw the same icy darkness. Not again.

  “Did you call House Howling?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “Why? Would you like to watch?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Kinky beast.”

  “Rogan!”

  He smiled at me. It was the kind of smile that blazed a trail from your heart to your mind and popped into your head the next time you wondered why you put up with a man who made you want to punch things.

  “You look sexy in the morning, Nevada.” His voice caressed me, his magic dancing on my skin, setting off tiny explosions of desire.

  “Stop,” I warned. The magic caress vanished.

  “It would be a shame to disappoint your relatives.”

  “I make it a habit to disappoint them on a regular basis.” I reached over and gently touched the skin under the gash. “How did this happen?”

  “Got nicked yesterday in the crowd.” His voice deepened slightly.

  I was still touching him, his skin warm under my fingertips. The faint scent of sandalwood swirled around me. He held completely still, as if worried I’d take my hand away.

  “I thought Olivia might have clawed you. She isn’t your biggest fan.”

  He smiled. “You noticed.”

  “You seemed to like Rynda. Why didn’t you marry her?”

  “Because I like her too much.”

  That stung. I pulled my hand back slowly. I shouldn’t have started this conversation.

  Rogan sat on the floor next to me and rested his arm on his bent knee. “When I was three, my father survived his sixth assassination attempt. He was attacked by a manipulator. My mother killed the assassin, but it fueled my father’s obsession to compensate for our weakness. You can’t kill what you can’t see. If only we were telepathic and telekinetic. Then we’d feel the killers coming. He’d tried to make a telekinetic-telepath hybrid with me and failed. He was determined to succeed with my children, so he started shopping for my bride.”

  “You were three.”

  “He was a long-term planner. Rynda is a powerful telekinetic and an empath. My father would’ve preferred a telepath, but to get telekinesis and mind manipulation in one Prime is very rare. They almost never occur together. He feared that if I married a telepathic Prime, our child would lose telekinesis. Rynda’s father is a telekinetic, her mother is a psionic, so her set of genes was perfect for his purposes. The tentative engagement agreement between our families was reached when I was three and she was two. That was the first time she attempted to levitate an object and succeeded.”

  “What did she levitate?” I asked in spite of myself.

  “Her parents were arguing and she tried to put a pacifier into her mother’s mouth to make her be quiet.”

  I pictured Olivia’s face with a pacifier in her lips and snickered.

  “Rynda was always a peacemaker. She likes when things are calm.”

  “So you knew you would marry her your entire life?”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “And for most of my childhood and adolescence I was okay with it. Marriage was something that would happen far away in the future and I liked Rynda. Especially after puberty.”

  Jealousy stabbed at me wit
h sharp little needles. “Rynda is beautiful.”

  “Gorgeous,” he said. “Elegant, refined, exquisite, ravishing . . .”

  Now he was just baiting me. I pretended to study my fingernails.

  “I get it that you’re heartbroken that she had another man’s children. That’s okay, Rogan. Don’t feel bad. I’m sure you’ll find somebody who’ll take pity on you . . . eventually.”

  He laughed quietly. “You’re prickly this morning. I could get used to this.”

  “Don’t. Are you going to tell me the rest of this story or should I just go home now?”

  “Alright. When I was sixteen, Rynda came to a party at our house. I don’t remember now what the occasion was, but I had caused my mother some grief and she was still recovering from it. I was a difficult teenager.”

  “You don’t say.” I rolled my eyes.

  “I was sixteen.” Rogan shrugged.

  “What did you do to make your mom mad at you?”

  He sighed. “Earlier that summer my father and I had gotten into an argument, and he told me that if I didn’t like the rules of the house, I should go live in a cardboard box on the street. I did. I walked out with the clothes on my back and nothing else. It took them almost three weeks to find me.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Downtown,” he said. “I didn’t think anything bad could happen to me. I slept on the street, ate at a soup kitchen, and got into a couple of fights with other homeless guys. Then I found people betting on fights under an overpass and beat up a couple of guys for money. I made fifty bucks and got my head bashed in by a guy who could magically harden his fists. A man tried to pick me up with promises of vodka and pizza. I didn’t like the look in his eyes, so I got into his car to see what would happen. Turned out he was fond of strangling. It didn’t end well for him. I never managed to find a cardboard box to sleep in. I slept in the park under some bushes until my father’s security people tasered me, pumped me full of sedatives, and delivered me back to my house.”

  I just stared at him. He wasn’t lying.

  “So when I woke up in my room, my mother chewed me out. She told me she’d worried. She told me I had no right to scare her like that. It was infinitely worse than sleeping on the street. By the time the party rolled around, we had resolved our family conflicts, so when Rynda asked my mother where I’d been for the past three weeks, my mother told her. Rynda started crying.”

  “Why?”

  “She picked up some residual traces of stress and fear from my mother. It upset her. She was sitting there, tears rolling down her cheeks, and asked my mother how she could put up with me. My mother told her that I was a gifted child and gifted children do extraordinary things. Rynda said that in that case she didn’t want gifted children. That’s when I knew I couldn’t marry her.”

  “Because she didn’t want gifted children?”

  Connor leaned closer and smiled again, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “No. Because I didn’t love her. Marriages among Primes are rarely based on love, but Rynda would know that I didn’t love her. It would always hurt her. And, selfishly, I realized that being with Rynda meant being alone. She wanted family, children, and stability. Safety. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but I knew I didn’t want that. I would take risks and it would crush her. And if I smothered my will and submitted to the marriage, I would always have to be cold to her. I could never let her feel the full extent of my anger, fear, or worry, because it would be cruel.”

  Rogan’s personality was like his magic: a powerful typhoon that swept away everything in its path. I had seen the extent of his rage and the intensity of his desire. When he focused on you, he did so completely and you felt privileged to be the object of his attention in spite of yourself. A true relationship required honesty. When he was scared, or raging, or helpless, he would have to calm down and pull his feelings inward before he went home. He would have to lie to her.

  Rogan had never lied to me. It hit me like a ton of bricks. Occasionally he worded his replies carefully, but he had never lied to me except for the time on the balcony, right after we watched his people being murdered. He’d lied on purpose, knowing I would react. He could’ve refused to answer my questions. Instead he always told me the truth, even when he knew I wouldn’t like the answers.

  “Something wrong?” he asked.

  “No,” I lied. “Go on with the story.”

  “Not much left. I officially broke off the engagement at eighteen. They held on to hope for another year, but when I joined the military, it was clear that all bets were off. Rynda married her now husband within six months. He is uninterested in politics and risky games, and by all indications he loves her.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  “No. She’s happy and I need somebody else. Someone who doesn’t crack under my pressure.”

  True. “That’s a tall order.”

  His face turned thoughtful. “Do you remember that big speech I made in your garage?”

  “Which one?” I sighed. “You’ve made several. I’m contemplating installing a personal soapbox with your name on it.”

  “The one where I said you would beg to climb into my bed?”

  “Ah. That one. How could I forget? I kept waiting for you to pound your chest like a silverback gorilla.”

  “Forget what I said—”

  A speaker came on and Bug’s voice resonated through the room. “Nevada, wake up. Bern says call him back right now. It’s urgent.”

  I grabbed my phone from the side table. Someone had turned the ringer off. I dialed Bernard.

  “Yes?”

  “Montgomery is on a video call in your office,” he said. “He’s pissed off. I tried to tell him you’ll call back, but he’s holding the line open.”

  Something bad had happened.

  I jumped off the couch and spotted my shoes on the side. I pulled them on. Rogan watched me.

  “Trouble?”

  “Probably.”

  “Do you need help?”

  “No.” Augustine knew where I was. He didn’t call here, which meant whatever new emergency had occurred was for me and me alone. I would handle my own affairs.

  I looked up at him. He was back to the familiar icy Prime, intense, hard, and lethal.

  “If I become a Prime, will you be my enemy, Rogan?”

  “No,” he said. “You have nothing to fear from me.”

  “I’ll hold you to it.”

  I dashed into the warehouse. A blue Honda CR-V was sitting in my parking lot. Bern met me at the door.

  I pointed to the Honda. “Do we have a client?”

  “No.” Bern’s face took on that collected expression that usually meant he was about to methodically recite a sequence of events that led to the Honda being in the parking spot and would probably start his story right around the Great Flood.

  I held up my hand, hoping to stave off the flow of information. “Later. What the hell is Augustine pissed about?”

  “This might be it.” Bern held up his tablet. A headline crossed it: “The Question of the Lady in Green: Should Primes Do More?”

  Just what I needed. I landed in my office chair, pulled my hair back the best I could, and pushed the key on the keyboard.

  “Yes?”

  Augustine’s perfect face was so cold it might as well have been carved of a glacier. “Congratulations, Lady in Green.”

  Damn it.

  “Your altruism bore rotten fruit. I told you so.”

  “It’s one lousy article, Augustine.”

  “I’m not talking about the article.”

  I leaned back and crossed my arms on my chest. “Will you please speed this up?”

  “Victoria Tremaine’s people contacted my office. She is on her way to Houston to see me. She’s asking for the identity of the Lady in Green.”

  I sat up straighter. Ages ago when I first realized I was a truthseeker, I looked up truthseeker Houses. There were three in the continental United States, and House Tr
emaine was the smallest and the most feared. It had only one Prime: Victoria Tremaine. She was near seventy and people hid when they heard she was coming. She didn’t just pull the truth out of her victims; she could lobotomize them and frequently did. Rich and feared, she wielded unprecedented power. I remembered looking at her picture—a tall aristocratic woman with vicious eyes—and thought she looked like some evil witch. The kind that had a noble title and ordered you skinned alive if you happened to spill a drink while serving it to her.

  “I have no desire to upset Tremaine,” Augustine said. “Neither do I want her anywhere near my office, but I can’t simply not see her. You have this one opportunity to tell me why she would be interested in you.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Make sure you figure it out. If you need protection from Tremaine, you must sign the contract I offered you. My House will defend its own. You have . . .” He checked the computer screen. “Twenty-two hours.”

  The screen went black. I looked at Bern. He raised his arms.

  If Augustine met Victoria Tremaine, she would pull my identity out of his head. I was a baby Prime, and I’d managed to get Baranovsky to admit things to me. Victoria had a lifetime of practice. Why would she be interested?

  A terrible suspicion ignited in my head. If Rogan was right, and I was a Prime, my talents had to come from somewhere. Spontaneous manifestations of Primes without anyone in their immediate family possessing a lot of power were extremely rare.

  “Is Mom home?”

  Bernard nodded. “Nevada, about the car . . .”

  “Later.”

  I got up and walked through the hallway into our house and to the kitchen. My mother was at the sink, rinsing a plate. Arabella lounged at the table, playing with her phone.

  My mother took in my hair. “Eventful night?”

  “Is there any reason Victoria Tremaine would be interested in me?”

  My mother’s face turned white. The plate slipped out of her hands and shattered on the floor.

  “Mom!” Arabella jumped up.